It is a tomb, within a tomb - albeit one that also holds daily guided tours as a museum.

Prince's ashes, laid to rest within a miniature Paisley Park urn, reside at his beloved Paisley Park complex. The cavernous studio facility, concert venue, business office, night club and, in the final years of his life, also his home (although no one seems certain exactly when he made it so). Unapologetic in the enigmatic life he led, he remains ever more obtuse in death. The few certainties there are, seem inexplicable at best and simply beyond us to know, understand, or explain fully.

Prince’s passing remains incomprehensible to all of us. We celebrate his life and legacy every day at Paisley Park, a place that Prince wanted to share with the world. Paisley Park Executive Director, Alan Seiffert

We can never be sure that Prince truly intended to open up his home to the public - outside of those events he specifically hosted there for his fans - but there are those within his inner circle who've since claimed this was precisely what he'd been planning. Why else would he have hoarded every conceivable outfit, prop or memorabilia from his professional life there? It would otherwise appear as a glaring contradiction for someone who so assiduously insisted that they never looked back at their own past. Or that the fastidiousness with which Prince maintained his privacy, would be set aside to share the contents of his makeup table, letting us in on the fact that his preferred brand was MAC?

And yet...when Paisley Park first became operational in 1987, his then-managers in rationalising the $10 million he had spent in creating it, convinced him to make the production facilities available for hire to others. This home studio run wild, should pay for itself. Subsequently, companies like Burger King and Cadillac; and artists such as Neil Young, Madonna, R.E.M., The Bee Gees, Barry Manilow and even The Muppets, availed themselves of his state-of-the-art rehearsal, recording and production empire.

That is, until Prince abruptly closed its doors to all but himself and his artists, in 1996.

Just like his legendary archive of completed albums, music promos, documentaries and live concert films that he consigned to the Vault, whatever project or idea he believed in so passionately, could just as easily turn to vapour in a heartbeat. There were never any logical explanations behind his creative or business decisions that made any sense to anyone else, and the financial consequences were seemingly never even briefly considered.

In 1987, a mere nine months after the release of his critically lauded masterpiece, Sign o' The Times, Prince convinced his record label to back the release of The Funk Bible. The album was to be shipped to stores with little promotion, no album title, artist name or production credits - just a plain black sleeve with the catalog number, 25677, imprinted in peach on the spine. Seven days before its scheduled release, however, Prince had a change of heart and personally put in a call to the president of his record label to scrap the album entirely. He even paid for the destruction of the 500,000 copies that had already been pressed, along with all costs incurred out of his own royalties.

Despite his expensive and heartfelt efforts to prevent anyone from hearing his latest work, over a hundred copies eventually found their way into the public domain, where it became better known, appropriately, as "The Black Album". Today, it is not only often cited as the biggest selling bootleg of all time; but the original, genuine copies, easily one of the rarest vinyl records to be sought after by collectors.

In 2018, a pristine, factory-sealed copy of the 1987 vinyl pressing surfaced at an auction and sold for over $42'000.

Prince later put The Black Album's fate down to the fact it was an "angry, bitter thing", and that he was "very angry a lot of the time back then". 1988's spiritually uplifting replacement, Loveysexy, was his initial response, followed by the subliminal, blink-and-you-will-miss-it message featured in his video promo for the lead-off single, Alphabet Street: "Don't buy The Black Album. I'm sorry."

Not to leave it there, Prince expounded on this further with a typically cryptic explanation in the accompanying epic LoveSexy concert tour that year, featuring live performances of Superfunkycalifragisexy and Bob George from The Black Album. In the souvenir tour program, he stated: "Tis nobody funkier - let The Black Album fly. Spooky Electric was talking, Camille started 2 cry. Tricked. A fool he had been. In the lowest utmostest. He had allowed the dark side of him 2 create something evil."

And yet...with all the anonymity and marketing novelty of releasing an album from a major artist without fanfare or credit; the opening track of The Black Album, makes it perfectly clear who was ultimately behind it all. In the spoken intro to Le Grind, buried in the mix, Prince's heavily distorted voice announces:

So you found me
Good, I'm glad
This is Prince
The cool of cools
Some of you not know this
But some of you may know
Some of you may not want to know
We are here to do service
Please don't try to stop us
For we come regardless
For we are strong as we are intelligent
So come vibe with us
Welcome to the Funk Bible
The new testament

The Black Album saga finally played itself out in 1994 with its official, limited release; but Prince's motivation for doing so was prompted by the fact that he wanted out of his 1992 contract renewal. Not wanting to record any new music for his remaining album commitments, he would only submit existing material for release to his record label. He had not changed his beliefs that The Black Album was still "evil", but amidst the lengthy and costly war he was waging with the music industry at large, this seemed to matter less than creative freedom and the ownership of his master recordings.

But the mystery remains to this day as to why this specific work's release was ever so bitterly contested by Prince in the first place. Exactly what prompted him to label the album as "evil"? He referred to his moment of epiphany - 1st December 1987 - as "Blue Tuesday", the night he met an aspiring poet called, Ingrid Chavez, in a local Minneapolis club. Earlier in the evening, Prince had tried MDMA for the first and only time, and according to several other sources who were present, was having "a bad trip".

During the course of that night-morning, the conversation with Chavez moved to the recently completed Paisley Park. They spoke at length about religion and spirituality; Prince later claimed that he had experienced a divine revelation as a result and was told to not "release that record". His former engineer, Susan Rogers, was also invited to the studio complex to meet Chavez in the early hours of the morning, but left shortly after speaking with Prince and seeing the condition he was in.

"It was really scary," she said.

“I’m interested in all experiences,” Prince stated in a 1995 interview with the NME. "Do people care if I take drugs?"

We shall never unearth the true extent of his addiction and reliance on the prescription - & clearly, black market - opioids that killed him. The majority of those who were close to him (or as close as one could be), all attest to his apparent clean and health-conscious lifestyle. But the truth probably falls somewhere between the full-blown addict some claim he was, and the need to simply control the pain he suffered due to decades of acrobatic stage performances in his trademark heels.

And yet...Prince seemed fully aware of the extent of his failing health and dependency on opioids to accept help from a prominent Californian addiction specialist. Unable to attend immediately, the physician sent his son, a pre-med student, to Minneapolis on the evening before Prince was found dead in his private elevator at Paisley Park, the next morning. Andrew Kornfield was there to assess the situation, before his father was due to meet with Prince on the following day. It is Kornfield's voice that can heard on the 911 call pleading for medical assistance, explaining the confusion when asked about his exact location: "We're at Prince's house..."

In the days and weeks ahead, a thorough search of Paisley Park - beyond the designated public and work areas - investigators found an alarming amount and variety of opioids. Prince's private living quarters and deserted behind-the-scenes offices, were openly strewn with pills of all descriptions. Some were mislabelled and placed in innocuous aspirin and vitamin containers, some were illegal counterfeit pills, some in prescriptions made out to Prince's travelling alias, "Peter Bravestrong", and his bodyguard and close confidante, Kirk Johnson.

None were in Prince's own name.

A toxicology report later revealed that an "exceedingly high" concentration of fentanyl was found in his blood, liver and stomach, and that in all likelihood, Prince was unaware of what he was taking for pain relief at the time. Perhaps tragically mistaking the counterfeit pills for hydrocodone/acetaminophen without realising they were laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin.

In 2018, the Carver County Sheriff's Office concluded its investigation into Prince's death, and released more than 15 gigabytes of data, including witness interviews, videos, and photos of Paisley Park. Unable to determine from whom or how the lethal counterfeit pills were obtained, they admitted: "We simply do not have sufficient evidence to charge anyone with a crime related to Prince’s death.

The images released are startling in their sad mundanity of how Prince lived out the isolated, haunted remainder of his years.

Despite maintaining his immaculate public appearance at all times, there appeared to be little of that glamour or luxury surrounding his private, hermetic existence. Like its owner, Paisley Park itself appeared to be in a state of disarray - portable space heaters provided the only climate control in lieu of the faulty air conditioning system required to heat the vast facility. Clear indications and signs of water damage and leaks were present throughout the complex. Empty executive offices on the first floor were used as make-shift dressing, laundry and storage rooms; filled with garbage bags, boxes, and suitcases stuffed with all manner of items. Clothes, shoes, letters, mail packages, notes in Prince's handwriting and thousands of dollars in cash were strewn and discarded throughout.

The near-mythic archives of unreleased material were piled high and scattered everywhere, including the trophy room leading to the much-fabled Vault itself. Prince had apparently forgotten the combination code, and never bothered to have it reset. When the Vault was finally drilled open, it was clear that there had previously been a flood that caused mould to form, metal storage cannisters to rust, and acetate degradation to some of his recordings. Cardboard boxes had to be peeled off the shelves. The appraisal, cataloguing and restoration of the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of recordings and memorabilia would prove to be an ongoing nightmare.

For Prince, who died intestate, none of this would seem to matter or add up to the sum of his life. Out of all the luxury residences and plots of land that he owned all over the world; he preferred to always return and live in his hometown. Prince never forgot his own humble beginnings and gave away millions in anonymity to many philanthropic causes that we still do not know about, any more than the recipients of his generosity, do. He ushered in and pioneered the age of online music distribution and streaming years ahead of the likes of Napster, iTunes, Spotify and Tidal; then walked away from it all, declaring in 2010: "The Internet's completely over."

Prince endured public humiliation and financial loss for the stand he took on behalf of artists' rights against the music and Internet industry. Arguments that are now commonplace and proved to be prophetically correct - he made the music business work for him - and had the ownership of his master recordings returned to him in 2014. Above all, he had the courage to leverage and risk the mainstream success of Purple Rain, into his own personal creative freedom.

And yet..Prince was ultimately a slave to his music - that much, we know, is all he ever really wanted.

In the months leading up to April 21, Prince had reportedly experienced chest pains and took to taking at least four aspirins a day to help alleviate the pain, until finally - and uncharacteristically - he added a bottle of wine to the mix. He feared that he might be suffering heart problems. Despite his slight size and build, he was a notoriously hard-working musician, pushing himself to the limits of exhaustion with little rest or food to sustain him during his marathon recording sessions or performances, it probably didn't help that he had recently also given up eating meat and had become a strict vegetarian. Prince collapsed and began vomiting, but was luckily rushed to a nearby hospital in Edina, southwest of Minneapolis, where his condition duly improved...

It was 1996.

This is a tragedy for all of us. To you, Prince Rogers Nelson was a celebrity. To us, he's a community member and a good neighbour. To family, he’s a loved one. In life he was a very private person...Carver County Sheriff, Jim Olson

The tragic anniversary of that date, exactly 20 years later, saw the ignoble and lonely death of Prince. He was discovered in the lift of his 70'000-square-foot studio complex, Paisley Park - where he had also taken to living in since 2006 - if there had not been medical arrangements made for him to meet with a specialist that morning, many more hours might have passed before his staffers found anything amiss. The vast creative centre did not even have a security guard on the premises; perhaps because it was now his full-time residence, or because he was simply beset by the cash-flow problems that had become the norm during the latter part of his career. Long gone were the days when Paisley Park was a bustle of activity, with a monthly payroll and running costs that reportedly ran to half a million dollars.

Such was the price of his independence.

Of course, the timing of Prince's death was a mere, sad coincidence and of no greater significance than the appearance of a rainbow over Paisley Park on that very same day. But, such events serve to highlight the very Prince-like reverberations throughout his 57-years, and in retrospect, they appear to have a far deeper meaning than the moment might have actually allowed at the time. For someone who was as pathologically private and shy as he was, doing little to set the record straight over the controversy of the myths that arose around him (as well as often encouraging such speculations), it was the perfect final enigma.

The nondescript, white aluminium and steel facility that is Paisley Park today, was a personal project that Prince first mentioned to associates in 1983, well before he joined the superstar-elite with Purple Rain. In other words, it was a dream he could ill-afford to make a reality. But Paisley Park's real spiritual beginnings as a utopian ideal can be traced back to his 1980 song, Uptown, where he wouldn't "let society tell us how it's supposed to be", and all that mattered was "about being free". Up until that point, the best that could be said about Prince was that he was viewed with suspicion as a precociously talented music-curio; far too sexually-and-religiously perverse to appeal to mainstream audiences. He was, though, a critical darling of the music press: a cult artist that everyone wants to claim they discovered first and recognized the greatness within, when nobody else did.

It was the self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics", Robert Christagau, who got there first when he wrote in his 1979 review of Prince's second album: "This boy is going to be a big star, and he deserves it".

When the Purple Rain triumvirate of the album, film and tour made good on this prediction - along with a 1985 Oscar win for Best Original Song Score - Uptown was no longer just a hedonistic Shangri-La, but had morphed into something else entirely. On the follow-up album, Around The World In A Day, Prince sang about a place with "colorful people whose hair on one side is swept back", and whose smiles "speaks of profound inner peace", because they'd apparently taken out a "lifetime lease". No one who heard the song on the album's release then, could have possible understood what he was going on about. Many assumed that world-wide fame had made him a bit, well, loopy and concluded that he was simply flirting with psychedelia as an artistic counterpoint to his previous work - was the joke on us or him?

The track was called, naturally, Paisley Park.

Paisley Park was built exclusively from the profits of Purple Rain, it would take more than 3-years to complete to Prince's exacting standards and he would invest over $10 million in cash to ensure that he owned it outright from the moment he bought a 200-acre plot of land in the Chanhassen district of Minnesota, in 1985. This creative, self-contained and state-of-the-art enterprise was seen by many as nothing more than a vain and expensive folly, even those close to him were unsure of its sustainability. There was simply no precedent for such an audacious ambition on the scale that Prince was envisioning for himself as a recording artist; but it was an act of intent that Minnesotans loved him for. Other notable stars from his home state (Bob Dylan, Eddie Cochran, Judy Garland and the Andrews Sisters), couldn't wait to get away fast enough - never to return - Prince chose instead, to never leave. He had made Minneapolis a cool place to hang out and put it on the musical map, and now he was setting up his base of operations in nearby Chanhassen.

Unfortunately, the realisation of Paisley Park coincided precisely with Prince's fading commercial appeal and sales. The crossover-breakthrough of Purple Rain was an anomaly that he would never again come close to matching even when he tried to in the 1990's, with Graffiti Bridge (the spiritual sequel to Purple Rain), Diamonds & Pearls and The Gold Experience. Prince had allowed his then-managers and business associates to believe that Paisley Park would pay for itself by leasing out its recording studios, vast rehearsal spaces, concert hall and post-production facilities to other acts, but he never really meant it. Paisley Park was too personal for him to ever treat as just a business, and he ploughed his considerable fortune and future earnings into keeping the dream that had started Uptown.

1988's Lovesexy marked the end of Prince's remarkable, nine-album run (includng the Black Album) that had started with Dirty Mind in 1980. As a leading, potent musical force, he was never as surefooted in his instincts again. The deluge of albums that followed, failed to generate the level of excitement and expectation as those that preceded them; the most melancholic, decades-long, career slide of any major recording artist in recent times given all of his incredible, virtuoso brilliance. He had just turned 30, and ahead of him lay chaos (much of it, self-created) and tragedy (the death of his son, Boy Gregory in 1996, and the dissolution of his two marriages) - and yet, he somehow survived it to become all the more respected, pioneering and influential as he'd ever been in his heyday.

And then, of course, there was his sheer bravery.

Is it just a matter of coincidence that on the album cover of his 1987 masterpiece, Sign o' The Times, Prince is seen walking away from the ruin of his stage paraphernalia? The public confrontation with his record company was a war that Prince initiated in the 90's to express his dissatisfaction and frustration with what he viewed as their restrictive practices: the refusal to release and promote albums and artists (on his own label called, well of course, Paisley Park Records) on his frenetic schedule; and more importantly to him – and the music industry now as a whole - the ownership of all his master recordings since 1978. Legally, his generous contract was on par with industry standards, so there was no hope of a long, drawn-out, expensive fight in the courts where he would almost certainly lose.

The PR battle that both sides waged during this period is well-documented. The name change to the infamous unprouncable glyph that later became variously, the more print-friendly "Symbol", or "TAFKAP" (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince), on his 35th birthday to free himself from all former contracts and obligations. His oft-quoted remark that "if you don't own your masters, your masters own you". The threat to re-record all his old material, so the new master recordings would belong to him under his new name. And the final straw - for his record company and his own career - scrawling "SLAVE" on his face in every public appearance and concert. If his aim was to embarrass his record company into surrendering to his terms, it succeeded (his master recordings were reverted to him in 2014, when re-signed with his old nemesis under a new deal), but the cost to him was enormous even though he was now free and on his own.

While the sincerity of his argument - that an artist should have the right to own their work - was not in doubt, and that he had a valid point in raising concerns about the question of authorship; he set about it his own peculiar, Prince-way for which he was openly mocked and rarely supported. If there is a single incident that sparked his animosity towards the record company that nurtured him from the age of 18, then it almost certainly happened around the creative windfall of music that Prince could barely contain prior to the release of Sign o' The Times. The triple album he presented for a 1987 release was called Crystal Ball, actually the culmination of material he had amassed for other abandoned projects known collectively as Dream Factory and Camille. Instead of being delighted by this embarrassment of riches however, the record executives were horrified by the idea of flooding the market with such an abundance of Prince material, which his most recent sales indicated there were no demands for.

They wanted him to scale back his album-a-year schedule, but finally - to keep him happy, and as a compromise - agreed to release a double album. Prince saw this decision as a personal affront to his standing as an artist, and even though critics universally hailed it as the album of the 80's, to him it was damaged goods. He lost interest in it almost immediately. The planned worldwide tour began and ended in Europe, he cancelled his UK dates and couldn't even bring himself to think about the US. Instead he chose to release a concert film to tour for him, but unhappy with the footage shot in Belgium and the Netherlands, he re-shot almost all of it at great expense at Paisley Park. Upon the film's release in late 1987 however, he failed to participate in any promotion for it at all, and even as critics - again - were trumpeting it as one of the best concert films of all time, it quickly died at the box office.

It was a perverse act of revenge and self-harm for what Prince saw as the mutilation of his real statement for the 80's, Crystal Ball.

Virtually ostracised by the music business that he had walked away from in the late 90's, Prince's financial affairs were in disarray due in no small part to his wilful decisions - at one point he even managed himself because he "didn't believe in contracts". Seemingly unaware that he no longer had a record company footing the bill for his myriad of projects and stable of protégés, he continued to record and film a massive amount of material (even by his standards) and consigned the lot to his famous climate-controlled underground Vault in Paisley Park. Without any quality control whatsoever, he released and distributed an alarming succession of albums that even his die-hard fans found difficult to digest. But even though he could now earn more by selling less, he was simply preaching to the already-converted. Without the PR muscle of a major record company behind him, the casual listener might have assumed that Prince had retired, his early albums after his emancipation were available only through mail order from Paisley Park.

As Prince struggled to re-establish himself on the music scene and to reinvent the business itself, the Internet arrived as a real means for him to continue to forge ahead with this independence. Even in the age of consumer dial-up speeds, he was amongst the first to see it as business opportunity to deliver his music directly to his fans for a fee. Before "streaming music" entered into mainstream usage, Prince was already there before MySpace or iTunes. Typically, though, he had a penchant for opening and abandoning numerous websites to test the patience of even his most loyal fans, it was almost as though once he had proven he was up to the task, he grew bored with it. Shortly after winning a Special Achievement Webby Award in 2006, he closed all his sites down and declared that "the Internet was over", deciding instead to concentrate on policing it for any hint of copyright infringement. He even went after his own followers by serving cease and desist orders to them for their non-profit fan sites, and indeed the life span of any material uploaded without his consent was known to disappear within hours.

By abandoning his online music distribution model, Prince had to turn to other means of getting his music out to the masses, and arrived at several novel ways to circumvent his lack of radio or MTV presence, to get on the charts. In 2004, Prince had already tested the waters by giving away copies of his Musicology album with every concert ticket for his tour of the same name, to boost the traditional sales figures. The ploy worked and he scored his first Top 5 hit for many years. He took it a step further in 2007 with Planet Earth, by making a deal with a UK publisher to give the album away for free in their Sunday newspaper - even though he had already agreed a distribution arrangement with Sony BMG in the UK - and walked away with an estimated $20 million profit from the album and tour.

This more-or-less set the pattern for Prince's main source of income during his later career, which came not from his recordings or independent album sales, but through his stellar performances on an apparent never-ending tour (much like fellow Minnesotan, Bob Dylan). Interest in Prince was maintained through a series of sell-out shows (he was 2004's highest-grossing live performer in the US), and music festivals for which he was handsomely remunerated - a reported $5 million for his 2008 headline appearance at Coachella; while his 21-night residency in 2009, at the O2 Arena in the UK, is a record unlikely to ever be surpassed. He had turned the idea of album promotion on its head, his tours did not support his latest release as such, but rather you bought his music because you'd seen him live.

Throughout his concerts, he seemed happier than ever in playing to the crowds, he appeared ageless and tireless, and was showered with music awards and recognition; we had all missed him and we didn't even know it until he reminded us again of his supreme gifts. Moreover, he promoted his music and shows by doing what he'd assiduously avoided in the early part of his career - he agreed to interviews on major US talk shows. This Prince was anything but the shy, awkward and monosyllabic version of the 80's, and the contrast was startling: he was funny, charming and entirely enigmatically normal. But some scars were difficult for him to hide and he never passed up an opportunity to take a swipe at the music industry, or remind viewers that he was still fiercely independent. If it was not exactly a comeback or return-to-form, then it was certainly a reinvention of the Prince you thought you knew; and he had done it on his very own terms.

It would be entirely appropriate to argue that at this stage in his life, his best work could be found not in his many recordings, but in his live performances. A few spring immediately to mind. There was his impassioned, blistering cover of the traditional spiritual, Motherless Child, on Spanish TV in 1999. He stole the show at the 2004 Rock Hall of Fame, with his electrifying two-minute guitar solo at the end of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, much to the delight of George Harrison's son, Dhani, sharing the stage with him alongside the clearly disapproving Tom Petty, Steve Winwood and Jeff Lynne. Maybe they’d underestimated, as many still do, his credentials as a one of the genuine guitar greats. But for pure musicianship, it's hard to beat his improvisational skills on All The Critics Love U In New York (or Montreaux, if you like) at their annual Jazz Festival in 2009.

And finally, just for fun, look at the 46-year-old Prince shimmying his way across the stage past Mel Gibson for an interview with Jay Leno on the Tonight Show in 2004.

It is difficult to accept in watching even a brief moment like that, that the ceaseless energy and invention of Prince has been dimmed by his solitary death in his beloved Paisley Park; but that in its own way is sadly fitting. In hindsight, we now know that his inscrutability also hid a lot of pain that he suffered and resolved to never acknowledge or accept - all those celebrated performances came at a terrible price. When the news of his passing broke, I received a text message from a friend that simply stated: "Purple Rain no more...", and the devastation I felt seemed wholly disproportionate to the fact that I never knew or met him. It is, I guess, a testament - not to his celebrity - but to the power of Prince's talent that I witnessed first-hand at his concerts. Entirely fitting then, that the first song that popped into my head was the funereal lament of the last track from his 1986 album, Parade.

At the conclusion of the 98-date Purple Rain Tour in 1985, an exhausted Prince told his then-manager that he was retiring from live shows because he was "going to look for the ladder". When asked to clarify the meaning behind that last remark; Prince replied, just as cryptically, "Sometimes it snows in April...".

Now I know what he meant.